On Wednesday, April 28th, Uptown Consortium Inc (UCI) hosted an Uptown Insights panel to discuss placemaking on both a national and local level. Fred Merrill, Principal Planner at Boston-based Sasaki, an award-winning planning and design firm, and Leslie Mooney, Executive Director of the Clifton Cultural Arts Center (CCAC), joined UCI’s Director of Real Estate, Franz Stansbury, for the discussion and Q&A session.
Stansbury started the conversation off by defining placemaking. “The simplest definition that we pay attention to is that it is the process of creating quality spaces that people want to live, work, and play in,” he said.
As the Director of Real Estate of UCI, Franz Stansbury leads the way in real estate decision making and planning, including UCI’s transformative placemaking strategy. This style of placemaking is different than other types of placemaking because it really focuses on creating destinations for work and play, enhancing an area block by block and connecting those sections as a larger community through transit or public spaces. Also, transformative placemaking strives to breakdown the silos between economic development, transportation, health care and others to advance a neighborhood on a local, interconnected level.
This placemaking process guides the design principles established by UCI to provide the framework to guide current & future decisions for the quality, design integrity, land use and neighborhood integration of new development. These principles are great streets, great spaces, and great places. When used properly, a development will go from just being a place to being an ecosystem of people, places, and things.
Fred Merrill, who has spent years working with UCI creating plans for the Corridor, built upon this idea of creating an ecosystem through placemaking. Utilizing the land around a development to inform design choices, transit opportunities, and scale of a project, among other things. Merrill stressed the importance of remembering it isn’t just about design and architecture, but about the people and how they will interact and use a space.
“At the end of the day it is about people, we want to make sure people are comfortable,” Merrill said. “It's about a social ecosystem, making places that are great for people to live and connect better.” Calling out activating the ground level of developments to create a lively energy, no matter the time of day, that makes people feel welcome and safe. Merrill also pointed out the importance of transportation in planning, he recommended developing pockets of a space and connect those areas with transportation, public green space, or other options. He even noted that using something like building a transportation center can be a catalyst to a larger development.
Leslie Mooney from the Clifton Cultural Arts Center (CCAC) spoke about creative placemaking and how it is being utilized in the Uptown area. Creative placemaking differs from transformative placemaking in that it strives to incorporate the arts as a tool in developing real estate, transit opportunities, safety issues, public health crises, or other community issues that impact the places that we care about. Using creative ways to not only make an area more visually pleasing but functional.
“Ultimately the goal of creative placemaking is building a sense of community, pride of place, and integrating the arts into the forefront of design and development, all the way through to the spaces being built,” Mooney said. She pointed out the Wednesdays in the Woods concert series in Burnet Woods as a great example of creative placemaking at work. By hosting live musical performances in the park each week, more and more community members joined and visited the park. They now have a very active community of volunteers for the park, helping to keep it beautiful and ready for future performances.
Both Mooney and Merrill emphasized the importance of getting the community involved early in the planning stages, this will help the development be successful and feel like it is a part of the community instead of others coming in and developing the area just because they can. UCI has worked closely with community groups to keep them engaged and informed as developments have progressed.
Stansbury wrapped up the session by asking Merrill and Mooney what they’ve learned in their respective experiences:
“The best success stories start at a sort of neighborhood or district, scale,” Merrill said. He elaborated on this idea saying going from a project plan to a real-life development should be tackled block-by-block or neighborhood by neighborhood. This slow and more deliberate development style allows “everybody to be a part of it and its inclusive,” Merrill finished.
Mooney emphasized again the importance of including the community for a project’s success. Not only that, she noted that the success of a placemaking goal is dependent on incorporating the culture of the community, “these bits of culture and art should not be forgotten or overlooked but integrated and woven into the plans.”
Watch the full placemaking presentation here. UCI is planning bi-monthly Uptown Insights panels and the next one will be held in June.